Harbour

He let go of the box and the perception faded as he moved his hand away, centimetre by centimetre. When the hand reached his face and moved across it, the feeling was gone. He was a person, not a tree.

It would take less than this to make you lose your mind.

Once when he was about twenty he had been at a party and had ended up next to a guy who had just swallowed a blue pill. They were sitting at a glass table, and the guy had stared at that table. After a couple of minutes he had started to cry. Anders had asked him why he was crying.

'Because it's so beautiful,' he had replied, his voice thick with emotion. 'The glass. I can see it, do you understand? What it's made of, what it really is. All the crystals, the strands, the tiny, tiny bubbles of air. Glass, you know? Do you understand how beautiful it is?'

Anders had looked at the table and had been unable to discover anything special about it, apart from the fact that it was an unusually ugly and clumsy glass table, but he had decided not to mention this. The guy might well have taken something else, because he was found later in a snowdrift into which he had dug his way. The reason he gave was that his blood had begun to boil.

You could lose your mind.

Perhaps a human being has the ability to see through glass, as it were, to experience water if we have a tool to help us use our brains and sensory perceptions to the full. But we don't do it, because of the toll it takes. We refrain, so that we may live.

Anders took a couple of swigs of water and got back into bed. The powerful experience of becoming aware of the water's secret life had made him feel exhausted but not sleepy, and for several hours he lay curled up, staring at the wall opposite where the pattern on the wallpaper formed itself into the molecular structures of unknown elements.

Only when the first light of dawn began to seep in through the window, painting the wallpaper grey, did he begin to drop off. As if from far away he heard the alarm clock ring in Simon and Anna-

Greta's room, and he could see them in his mind's eye, getting up and dressing for their short honeymoon. Enjoy yourselves, my darlings. There was a faint smile on his lips as he fell asleep.

Those Who Have Turned Away

Staircases that go upwards although in fact they’re going downwards…

Kalle Sandare

Maja

'Let go of me! Let go of me!'

I don't like him. He looks horrible. I scream. The other one comes and puts his hand over my mouth. I bite him. It tastes of water. Why don't Mummy and Daddy come?

They're carrying me somewhere. I don't want to go. I want to go in Mummy and Daddy. I'm too hot. My snowsuit is too hot. We're going down some steps. I scream again. Nobody can hear me. That '.s when I start crying. There are a lot of steps.

I try to look so that I can remember the way back. There is no way back. There are only steps. And they don't work.

I'm crying. I'm not as frightened anymore. I don't want to scream any more. Just cry.

Then it gets warmer and something smells nice. They're not holding me as tightly any more. I'm not struggling. I stop crying.

The moped

Anders was already sitting up in bed when he discovered that he was awake. His body was drenched in sweat and his heart contracted; he thought for a moment that he was in a cell. Then he recognised the walls, the pattern on the wallpaper, and realised he was still in the guest room at his grandmother's house.

But he had been there, inside Maja's memory.

He had felt the fear, the heat, and screamed from the depths of own lungs. He had seen the incomprehensible flight of steps and he had seen Henrik and Bjorn. Henrik had carried him and Bjorn had put a hand over his mouth when he screamed.

A dream. It was a dream.

No. Elin too had been tormented by memories that were not her own. Pictures she could not possibly have known about. The memories of others. This was the same thing.

Henrik and Bjorn. Hubba and Bubba.

He knew what he had to do. The clothes he had worn to the wedding were hanging on the bedpost, but he rejected those and picked up his own clothes, which lay in a heap in the corner. Despite the fact that they had been accidentally rinsed by the sea, the fluffy Helly Hansen top and the scruffy jeans still smelled unpleasant. They were impregnated with the smell of smoke, spilt wine and the sweat of fear, and it would take a proper wash to get rid of all that.

But still. This was his uniform. He pulled it on with the intention of wearing it until the whole thing was over. He gathered up his bottles and comics from the floor. When he looked at the lines on the Bamse cartoon, he could see that the zigzag line he had taken for a temple could just as easily be a flight of steps.

He took a few gulps of water. The perception of Maja's presence in his body was once again so familiar that he didn't even feel it, he simply knew that it was there. When he had swallowed the water, he opened the matchbox.

The insect had grown, and was now so fat that it only just fitted in the box. When Anders let a heavy gob of saliva fall on to it, it came to life and began to writhe in its narrow confines. Anders pushed the box shut and closed his hand around it, once again feeling that all-encompassing awareness of the water around him, within him.

He could feel the movements of the larva through the thin cardboard and felt a little sorry for it. But this was not the right moment to reflect on cruelty to animals and the rights of insects. In any case, Simon had said at the kitchen table that it wasn't an insect. It had no will of its own, no purpose other than to be a source of power for its bearer. A kind of battery. Spiritus.

Anders tucked Maja's snowsuit under his arm and went down to the kitchen. It was just after eleven o'clock. There was a note in Anna- Greta's handwriting on the table. He was to take care of himself, and everything he needed was there in the house, there was absolutely no need for him to go out.

There was coffee in the machine, and Anders poured himself a cup. As he drank it he could feel every tiny movement of the liquid passing through his body. When he had finished he fetched a plastic bucket from the cleaning cupboard and half-filled it with water from the tap. He sat down on a chair with the bucket between his thighs, held the matchbox firmly in one hand and dipped the fingertips of his other hand in the water.

He simply knew.

As if the hand in the water were holding a remote control, or rather had become a remote control with which he was so familiar that he no longer needed to look at the buttons, he was now able to direct the water. His hand did not exist, the signals went directly from his brain to the contact surface.

He asked the water to move clockwise, anti-clockwise. He asked it to climb up and run over the top of the bucket so that his legs were soaked. Then he put down the bucket, placed his hand on the wet fabric and asked